The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 51

He never had to stand up in the cars, for he boarded them, whether at one end of his trip or the other, before they were crowded; but as soon as crowds began to fill up the aisles he always gave up his seat. This naturally gained him repeated credit for courtesy, but the real reason for his apparent gallantry was that he could not see people's faces when he was sitting while others stood in the aisles. But when he hung to a strap and looked at the window in front of him, the blackness outside combined with the bright light of the car to make the gla.s.s of the windows an excellent mirror to reflect the faces of those who stood near him.

To cla.s.sify faces according to nationality was not easy in the polyglot crowds of this East Side line. But Mr. Neal devised many schemes to help him. He watched the papers they read: everybody read papers! He even ventured when greatly curious, to ask a question of the object of his interest, so that the man might reveal his origin. Usually he was rebuffed, but sometimes he was successful. He read all the books on immigrants he could get his hands on. More than once he even followed a rare specimen--shadowed him to his work and there made guarded inquiries. Such investigations had several times made him late to work, so that his chief had made sarcastic remarks. The chief clerk at Fields, Jones & Houseman's was a tall, gaunt, old-young man with a hawk-like nose that carried eyegla.s.ses perched perilously astride it, and he had a tongue that spit caustic. But the chief clerk's ugly words did not annoy Mr. Neal if his inquiry had been successful.

At length he became so skillful that he could separate the Slavic types into their various nationalities, and he could tell Polish, Lithuanian and Roumanian Jews apart. He could name the provinces from which Italians and Germans came with few errors.

But the most interesting set of categories, according to which he filed away the various faces he saw was that of their ruling pa.s.sions. There was the scholar, the sport, the miser, the courtesan, the little shopkeeper, the clerk, the housewife, the artist, the brute, the hypocrite, the clergyman, the bar-hound, the gambler. The charm of this cla.s.sification was that the categories were not mutually exclusive, and permitted infinite variation.

Mr. Neal became as devoted to this fascinating game as ever any enthusiast has been to billiards, golf, baseball or poker. He looked forward all day, while in the midst of the ancient grind of Fields, Jones & Houseman, to the moment when he could establish himself in a position of vantage on a subway car, and get back to his study of faces.

All night long he dreamed of faces--faces wise and foolish, good and evil.

Yet more and more the ugliness in the subway faces oppressed Mr. Neal.

Sometimes he looked into faces loosened by liquor and saw such an empty foulness looking out at him that he was heartsick. Then he would look at all the faces about him and see sin in manifold guise marking all of them. The sodden eyes of disillusion, the protruding underlip of l.u.s.t, the flabby wrinkles of dissipation, the vacuous faces of women: it was a heart-breaking picture gallery.

Every face was stamped with the little pa.s.sion peculiar to it--the mark of its peculiar spirit. The mouths, especially, betrayed the souls within. Somewhere Mr. Neal had once read weird stories of souls seen to escape from the bodies of dying persons, and always they had been seen to issue from the open mouths of the corpses. There was a singular appropriateness in this phenomenon, it seemed to Mr. Neal, for the soul stamped the mouth even before it marked the eyes. Lewd mouths, and cunning mouths, and hateful mouths there were aplenty. Even the mouths of children were old in evil.

"I'm sorry I've learned it," breathed Mr. Neal one day. "Now I must always look into a man's soul when I look into his face."

It was true. Men who could hide secret sins from bosom friends--even from their wives--were defenseless against this little clerk hanging to a strap--this man with the serious pale face and the large grey eyes who had learned by years of systematic observation to pierce every barrier of reserve.

His study and cla.s.sification went on for several years before it occurred to him that there was one kind of face that he never saw--one type that he never found in all the Manhattan crowds. When he had first discovered that this face was missing he had called it "the good face;"

and though he realized the insufficiency of this designation he could not think of a better, and the term stuck. It was not that he never saw faces with good qualities stamped upon them: he sometimes saw faces marked with benevolence, honesty and resolution, for example, and these were all good faces in a way. But they were not what Mr. Neal was looking for--what he searched for more intently with the pa.s.sing months.

He remembered the face of his own mother dimly through the years; it was a little like what he wanted to see here in the subway. He searched for simplicity, for transparent truth, for depth of spirituality, for meek strength and gentle power. But simplicity in the subway? Guileless transparency of any sort? Spirituality? Mockery!

The face he never saw became an obsession with Mr. Neal. He hunted for it in various parts of the city. He tried the Broadway line of the subway where the faces are notably pleasanter, more prosperous, and smugger. But neither there nor about the Universities on Morningside Heights and on the banks of the Harlem, nor in Brooklyn, nor anywhere he looked, did he find the face he sought. He could always see it when he closed his eyes. At night he dreamed of it continuously--of meeting it on the subway and looking into eyes of ineffable kindness.

It came finally to affect his life--this search for the unseen face. It gradually altered his att.i.tude toward all his subway folk. He came to have a great pity for the ignorant, and pain filled his heart at all the marks of Cain he saw. He came to have an inexpressible hunger for the sight of spiritual quality lighting the faces of the people of the subway crowds. He did not express his hunger in words, as people do when they want to make a thing definite and tangible. It was perfectly clear and distinct to him when he closed his eyes; then he saw the face.

The time came when Mr. Neal could not sleep of nights for the evil faces that leered at him from every side out of the darkness. It was only when he slept that he could see, in his dreams, the "good face." Finally, he was driven to make a resolution. He would consciously seek for the good faces; evil ones he would pa.s.s over quickly. Thenceforward he was happier. As his train roared through the tunnels of night under New York, his eyes dwelt most upon the faces that were marked, however lightly, with the qualities that reached their united culmination in the "good face." He found his old faith in the perfectibility of man renewed, and often he would keep his eyes closed for many minutes together, so that he could see the face of his dreams.

So months went on, and joined together into years.

Then, one day in the subway, with his eyes full open, James Neal suddenly saw the face! He had been going home from work in the evening quite as usual. The express train on which he was riding was about to leave Fourteenth Street Station when a tall man who was about to enter the local train standing at the other side of the station platform turned and looked directly at him. Mr. Neal's heart almost stopped beating. His eyes were blinded, and yet he saw the face so distinctly that he could never forget it. It was just as he had known it would be, and yet gentler and stronger. A moment Mr. Neal stood spellbound. The door of his own car was sliding shut; he leaped toward it, and, as we have already seen, squeezed through and ran toward the other train.

Though he was too late to get in, still he could see the face within the moving car. Thinking about it later, as he did very, very often, he realized that he could not tell how the man with the "good face" was dressed; he could see only his face, and that for a moment only, as the local moved swiftly out of the station. Suddenly he found himself alone and disconsolate.

He went home sick in spirit. As he lay in his bed that night, trying to go to sleep, he said to himself that if ever he should see the face again--and he prayed that he might--no merely physical barriers should keep him from seeking out the rare spirit that animated such features.

Ah, but it had been much even to have seen that face; even that had been worth living for. At last he fell asleep peacefully.

The next morning Mr. Neal entered upon a new life. He had seen the face; it had not been a dream after all. He felt young again--not young with the ambition he had once felt so strongly, but glad and cleansed and strengthened by a sure faith in the supremacy of truth and goodness in the world. A happy smile lighted his serious face that morning; a faint flush touched the pallor of his cheeks; and his deep grey eyes were unusually luminous.

Even the roar of the subway did not pull his spirits down, and when he briskly entered the office of Fields, Jones & Houseman, the old-fas.h.i.+oned high desks and stools and all the worn, dingy furniture of the room seemed to the little clerk with the s.h.i.+ning face to be strangely new. The chief clerk, sitting at a dusty old roll-top desk in the corner, looked up at Mr. Neal sharply as he entered. The chief clerk always looked up sharply. There was a preternatural leanness about the chief clerk which was accentuated by his sharp hawk's nose, and when he looked up quickly from his position hunched over his desk, his sharp little eyes pierced his subordinate through and through, and his gla.s.ses, perched halfway down his nose, trembled from the quickness of his movements.

"Morning!" he said briefly, and dived down again into his work, with his shoulders humped.

But Mr. Neal was more expansive.

"Good morning!" he called, so cheerily that the whole office felt the effect of his good humor.

A young man with a very blond pompadour was just slipping into a worn office coat.

"Well, Mr. Neal!" he exclaimed. "I swear you're getting younger every day!"

Mr. Neal laughed happily as he changed his own coat and climbed upon his familiar stool. His desk neighbor turned and regarded him good-naturedly.

"He'll be running off and getting married pretty soon," prophesied the neighbor, for the benefit of the whole office force.

Mr. Neal laughed again.

"You're judging me by your own case, Bob," he rejoined. Then in a lower tone, "That romance of yours now--how is it coming?"

That was enough to cause the young man to pour into Mr. Neal's willing ear all the latest developments of Bob's acquaintance with the only girl in the world.

For a long time Mr. Neal lived in daily hope of seeing the face again.

He got into the habit of changing to a local at Fourteenth Street because it was at that station he had seen the face before, but he caught not a glimpse of any face resembling the one that he could see at any time he closed his eyes. Yet he was not discouraged. He was happy, because he felt that something big and n.o.ble had come into his life--that now he had something to live for. It was only a question of time, he told himself, until he should find the face. It was but a question of time--and he could wait.

So the weeks and months pa.s.sed by. Mr. Neal never relaxed his search for the face; it had become a part of his life. There was no monotony in his great game. He always found new faces interesting to cla.s.sify, some unusual combination, some degree of emotional development he had not seen before. But _the_ face never.

Until one Sat.u.r.day half holiday in December. This is the way it happened.

Mr. Neal employed this particular half holiday at Columbus Park. Long ago he had found this park, adjoining Chatham Square and near Chinatown, Mulberry Bend and the Bowery, a great gathering place for the lower types of humanity, and such half holidays as he did not spend at the library studying Lombroso, Darwin, Piderit, Lavater, and other physiognomists, he usually employed at Columbus Park. Sometimes he wandered over to Hester Street, or up Orchard or some other Ghetto street off Delancey, or sometimes he spent a few hours in Battery Park or in the tenement district of the lower West Side. On this particular Sat.u.r.day he found Columbus Park less populous than it had been on his last visit a month before, for many of its habitues had sought warmer climes. The weather was seasonably cold, and Mr. Neal felt really sorry for some of the old, broken-down men and women he saw.

Toward the end of the short December afternoon, he found an old man, shaking with the cold, huddled up on one of the benches of the park. The haggard, unshaven face told the usual story of the derelict, but something in the face--perhaps the abject fear that glowered in the eyes--sounded before he knew it the depths of pity in the little clerk's heart. Mr. Neal tried to talk to him, but there was no ready beggar's tale to be poured into the ears of benevolence; there was only fear of the cold, and of misery, and of death. Yielding suddenly to an impulse so strong that it bore down all thoughts of prudence, Mr. Neal slipped out of his own overcoat and put it about the man's threadbare shoulders, and then hurried off toward the Worth Street Station of the subway.

The wintry breeze chilled him as he hastened along, a slight figure in worn business suit, leaning against the wind, but his heart was warm and light within him. Down he hurried into the subway station, and dropped his t.i.the of tribute into the multiple maw of the Interborough. The train was thundering in, its colored lights growing momentarily brighter as they came down the black tunnel. The train was crammed to the doors, for it was the rush hour and even down here the trains were crowded. Mr.

Neal edged into the nearest door and then squirmed over to a place against the opposite door in the vestibule, where he could see people as they came out.

The train shot again into the dark tunnels. A thousand men and women were being hurtled at terrific thundering speed, by some strange power but half understood, through the black corridors of the night that reigned under old Manhattan, to some unseen goal. It was magnificent; it was colossal; but it was uncanny. Mr. Neal had always been moved by the romance of the subway, but tonight, in his elevation of spirit, it seemed something of epic quality, full of a strange, unreal grandeur.

Faint red lights here and there revealed nothing of the tunnel; they but lent mystery to dimly seen arches and darkling bastions, fleeting by the roaring train.

They stopped a minute at Ca.n.a.l Street, and more people pushed into the overcrowded car, and then the train was off again. The man pus.h.i.+ng against Mr. Neal was heavy-jowled as a prize-fighter, but if ever he had followed the ring his fighting days were over now. Good feeding had done for him; he breathed heavily in the fetid atmosphere of the car. He was almost squeezing the breath out of the little man with a heavy red mustache who stood just behind him. The red mustache made the little man's face seem out of proportion; there was not enough of chin to make a proper balance.

At Spring Street two women struggled to get off.

"Let 'em off!" came the familiar admonition of the guard.

Those about the women made every effort to give them room, but at the best they had a hard fight to make their way out. Both the women were modishly dressed, and their complexions were correctly made. There was, too, that hardness about the mouths of both of them that Mr. Neal found in the faces of most of the women he saw--a hardness that even the stress of their effort to get out of the car could not disturb. When they finally got out, others crowded in.

Mr. Neal was happy, and he looked about him to find other happy faces.

But they were nowhere to be seen; the faces were stolid, or indifferent, or intent, or vacuous. None of them were glad. If their mouths would only turn up at the corners! Well, it was the same old story. Mouths that turned up at the corners were seldom met with in Mr. Neal's book of subway faces.

Bleecker Street, and a worse jam than ever, but there was encouragement in the thought that Fourteenth Street would soon relieve the pressure.

Two girls crowded on at Bleecker, amid shrill laughter and many smothered exclamations. Their lips were carmined and their eyes bold.

Every swerve of the train brought fresh giggles or stifled screams from them.

As the train was slowing down for Astor Place Station an express train pa.s.sed it, speeding for Fourteenth Street. Mr. Neal turned with an effort (for he was wedged in tightly) and looked through the gla.s.s door at the brightly lighted cars as they pa.s.sed, and then slowly gained upon, his own train. The express was crowded too, with people standing in the aisles, hanging to straps. The faces were very clearly distinguishable in the bright light; and Mr. Neal, strangely excited at this rapid panorama of faces, saw each one distinctly. Suddenly he leaned forward, close to the gla.s.s. He saw it! The face! It was there!

But it was gone in a moment. It had been like a flash in the dark tunnel. His own train had come to a jarring stop, and the express was only thunder in the distance.

Mr. Neal felt that he must rush out of the car, must get out into the open. But the big prize-fighter still pressed against him, and in a moment they were rus.h.i.+ng on again into the darkness.